


Herald

by Deriliarch



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 08:23:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13947645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deriliarch/pseuds/Deriliarch
Summary: Being followed by people is not the same as being among them. Lavellan feels like she no longer belongs to just herself.





	Herald

As an Inquisitor, she is all skinned knees and bruised elbows, torn breeches. This shemlen wear is fine, but it’s nothing like her hunting leathers, they wouldn’t give after such a simple slide down a rocky slope.

  
Simple.

  
Josephine tuts gently because what about her image, her safety, she is far too important to be a ruffian. She can’t keep endangering herself like this, she has people to lead. She is not a hunter anymore. She is not a forest dweller anymore. She wears these clothes so as not to be an elf among shem but a Herald among people. She must not distance herself further than she is, blessed and powerful and legendary and lonely as she is.

  
She remembers when her life and body were her own and she didn’t have to house thousands of spirits in her thoughts, under her ribcage as she fights, defending them all more dearly than her heart against the red templar’s blade.

  
When her People ask for favors—do they not know they are still her heart? Still her home? They are not favors but services—when they say ‘Herald of Andraste’, she wants to go in person. See her aravel, say ‘Keeper, I’ve remembered, the old ways, how to thank a halla, I am not one of them’. She remembers.

  
And how she misses her forests. She sees such wonders; the heaving, yawning sea, the bone white desert underneath the cold moon, sunken caves and soaring heights. But the towering trees that would have dwarfed these saplings like undergrowth, pale wood, mossy roots….

  
She lives in a castle, now. There is stone and fine cloth, wooden floors, spitting fires against mountain chill. There are vast craggy backs bearing up her stronghold on their snowy shoulders. Mountains are still. Mountains are eternal. She does not roam as she used to.

  
She misses seas of stars lighting the rolling plains, and the smell of midnight moss, and sunlight in the pines, and the creaking of their landships. She misses ‘dahlen’ and ‘vhenan’ and ‘dareth shiral’ and though Solas speaks them and Sera reviles, they are not…hers the way Lavellan was.

  
Is.

  
Was.

  
I am not one of them, she says. But I am not one of you either.

  
She is the one, standing atop a pinnacle, she is the one that speaks to Gods. But when she leans on her cold stone balcony in her cold stone room in her cold stone stronghold on her cold stone mountain, alone, she can only hear the sound of the cold, cold wind.


End file.
